Category Archives: Humor

I already picked on the dispatchers in my last parody. So, here is the as yet untitled EMS Day carol (to the tune of Jingle Bells). It needs some work in parts, so feel free to chime in in the comments.

Sliding through the snow
in a rig that’s got no breaks
there’s been no time for coffee
we’re both getting the shakes.
Dispatch is on our ass
to clear for another call.
I just wanna clean my rig of this puke and alcohol.

Restocking in the bay
the Charge Nurse stares us down.
“Get back in your rig
and drive out of my town.
All your bringing me
is crackheads, drunks, and liars.
If I see you two again
I swear I’ll slash your tires.”

[chorus]
Pager tones.
Dispatch drones,
tell us where to go.
No time to eat or drink or pee
we’ve gotta hit the road.
MVC, she tells me
the callers are all pissed.
My partner just broke out in tears
for the lunch that we just missed.

Roll up on the scene.
No patients to be found.
Just some ugly marks,
and a road sign on the ground.
Clear on the MDT.
Head off to McDee’s
Then the stupid robot sqwalks at me
“Incident Assigned!”

[chorus]
Pager tones.
dispatch drones, tell us where to go
No time to eat or drink or pee,
we’ve gotta hit the road
You call we haul
is what we tell ’em all
Not just something that we say.
It’s been fun
now I gotta run.
Hashtag my EMS Day

I’m a pretty big fan of parody music, including certain holiday parodies. From time to time my own creative juices flow. Recently I’ve cooked up a couple parody songs for my friends in public safety. Here’s the first finished one, an ode to a new dispatcher who … needs a little help.

I’m Still A Trainee At Christmas

(to the tune of “I’m Gettin’ Nuthin’ for Christmas”)

I dropped the wrong department’s tones.
Somebody snitched on me.
I disconnected all the phones.
Somebody snitched on me.
Told a caller to grow a pair,
“suck it up man life’s not fair”.
Guess I shouldn’t have gone there,
cuz somebody snitched on me.

[chorus]
I’m still a trainee at Christmas.
My supervisor is mad.
I’m still a trainee at Christmas.
She says I’m the worst one she’s had.

Sent fire to a cat in a tree.
Somebody snitched on me.
Faked warrants in NCIC.
Somebody snitched on me.
Mixed up the disposition codes.
renamed half the county roads.
remote killed the chief’s radio.
And somebody snitched on me.

[chorus]
So, I’m still a trainee at Christmas.
My supervisor is mad.
I’m still a trainee at Christmas.
She says I’m the worst one she’s had.

I won’t be seeing Bonus claus.
Somebody snitched on me.
I won’t get my days off because,
somebody snitched on me.
Next year I will get it right.
Next year they’ll cheer with delight.
Don’t tell ’em I crashed CAD tonight.
Please nobody snitch on me.

[chorus]
Cuz, I’m still a trainee at christmas.
My supervisor is mad.
I’m still a trainee at Christmas.
She says I’m the worst one she’s had.

The preceeding parody is delivered for fun and entertainment. Any resemblance to any person(s) who are now, have ever been, or ever will be engaged in the profession of public safety communications is strictly coincidental, and potentially unfortunate. No disrespect is intended either. I have the highest respect for everyone in the PS field.

Each year, as a part of my employer’s christmas Party,there is a tradition of singing parody songs about funny/memorable/characteristic things other colleagues have done in the previous year. This year, I got picked on.

Tony the Tech Man (to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman”)

Tony the tech man

Was a jolly techy soul

With a brand new JAWS, and a CD rom and two cell phones in the bowl

Go for a plunger

We need it right away

Check here and there

And at ace hardware, don’t forget about ebay

Flushedy flush flush

Flushedy flush flush

Round the bowl they go

Clickety click click

Clickety click click

Look at that techy go!

If you haven’t already figured out why this was necessary, here’s the backstory.

Some of you know that I can be a terminal clutss. Parenthetically, my Mom would likely attribute this to the fact that I tend to move at warp 3 and don’t always pay enough attention to where I’m going… and she’s probably correct. Sadly, this got the better of me twice, as i sent two cell phones for a swim in the toilet.

The first one was back in March at a hotel in LA. I had tossed a bottle of Coke into the trash can and missed. While leaning over to pick it up my fat belly dislodged the quick release clip on my phone case. It was one of those moments where time slows to a crawl, and you fight the inevitable, but you know no matter what you do, that thing is slipping from where it has come to rest, between you and the top of the toilet seat, and going in. As it is prone to do, time reengages.

*Mad grab for phone. Splash! Explative deleted. yank phone from bowl; shake madly; tear off case; yank battery and SIM chip; out of insane despiration (this was a pricey phone after all) suck as much water from the speaker grill and headphone jack as possible (no, i did not swallow it), thanking God that you hadn’t just contaminated the toilet prior to this incident; rip the hair drier from the wall, turn it on high and blast the phone for 15 minutes; After a while, give the unit up as lost and scour the convention for a dealer selling new units; strike out; IM spouse from the hotel bar and say you’ll be out of contact for a while; bang head against wall; borrow demo phone from employer for trip home.

Fortunately, the phone actually survived. I powered it up the next morning after flying back to Baltimore and things worked again.

The second time, with my iPhone, I was not so lucky. Basically this time it slipped out of my hand while I was trying to answer a call and shot behind me into a toilet at work. This time I was not so ready to admit it to Treva, both out of self-annoyance and the knowledge that I would quite likely experience a great deal of ribbing. Unfortunately, the 3g radio was a casualty of the water and I had to do an out of warranty replacement (thanks Apple for adding that option and not making me suffer the full cost of replacing the phone).

So that’s what lead my wonderful friends at work to sing about me. Oh, you can all thank Treva for this post too. ??

While Twitter is fantastic for short, off the cuff messages about what’s happening. Sometimes one-hundred forty characters just isn’t enough to give an accurate picture of the situation and gems like the following clearly scream for clarification.

Accidentally made @trevaolivero flash the neighborhood. Sorry ’bout that Babe

First, a little backstory. For those of you who don’t know, due to one to many encounters with Rippy the Gator*, Treva had her right leg amputated above the knee some years ago. She doesn’t currently wear a prostesis because of the inept incompetance of the last tech who tried fitting her for one, and she can’t walk all that far even with it on.

She had agreed to babysit for our friends’ son AJ last night, and being the dedicated husband/shirpa that I am, I went along with the explicit understanding that “I don’t do diapers”.

In typical Baltimore fashion our friends house has about eight steps leading to the front door broken into two groups separated by a landing. Our usual technique for getting up and down the stairs is executed with her placing her stump on my bent thigh, which is on the step she will be moving to, my arms wrapped around her waist for support and her hopping to that step. Normally, to avoid either of us, terminal clutses that we are, tripping on her loose pantleg one of us holds onto it. Yesterday she was wearing a skirt. I figured it might be a good idea to keep it pulled up like I usually do with her pants. Unfortunately, I had only grabbed the front half of the garment when I lifted it to her waist.

Treva: “You’re holding up my skirt.”

Me (well duh, I’m trying to help here): “Yeah. I know. I figured it would help.”

In honor of today being Earth Day (andsince TSDiveDani on Twitter made me think of it) I dug back into the e-mail archives and found a copy of Topfive.com’s Top 15 Worst Ways to Celebrate World Environment Day. (please don’t flame, it’s for humor’s sake).

????? The Top 15 Bad Ways to Celebrate World Environment Day
15> Lemur kabobs for everyone!

14> Set up a booth at the nearest mall called “The Wonderful?World of Natural Fertilizer.”

It’s not a huge problem. Nothing like smoking, or a personal crack habbit, or a serious liking of New Kids on the Block or something horrible like that which will almost certainly lead to an intimate knowledge of every rehab facility down the eastern seaboard. Nothing like that I assure you. What I suffer from is a ridiculous form of OCD (or, according to my colleague KZ “CDO, because if you have OCD it has to be alphabetized) that requires me to be bothered if a light is off and the switch is in the up position.

You know the kind of lights I’m talking about. There’s two switches and you can turn them on/off from wherever. Drive. Me. Nuts.

We have three of them in our apartment. The kitchen, the hallway, and Treva’s pride and joy, her walk-in closet. The kitchen and hallway lights are easy enough to avoid. I put enough crap near them to make reaching the secondary switch annoying at best.

It absolutely drives me batty when the switches aren’t all down. I have been known to walk out of my way just to set them to the “right” position.

last night I took some dry cleaning out of her closet and hit the switch closest to me. I had to flip it up. Ug! Treva was in the other door (I should clarify, her walk-in closet connects our bedroom to the master bathroom) so I didn’t fix it at the moment. I walked into the living room and out of the corner of my semi functional eye saw the light come on. I thought to myself “oops, guess she wasn’t done in there” and went on my merry way to spend quality time with my friend Dryel.

Fast forward to this morning when I hear, “You’ve made me inherrit your OCD.”

Me: Huh?
Her: Last night I had to fix the lightswitch. You have rubbed off on me.
Me: HAHAHAHAHAHA!

It has been an unacceptably long time since I communicated with you all. I have no excuse, but I do offer the following explanation.

Every time I think to myself “ooh, that would be a great thing for the blog” and actually sit down to write the Procrastatron 5000XT kicks in and convinces me to not do it.

See, if you’ve never heard of it, the Procrastatron 5000XT is a vial little microchip who’s job it is to make me lazy and convince me that I don’t need to do a particular thing at a particular moment. I am convinced that during one of the 312 cornea transplants I had as a kid, a crazy mad scientist snuck into the OR and implanted the Procrastatron where my right eye should be. Procrastatron is a handy little thing to have on a rainy weekend when I should be cleaning the house, but would much rather be reading a book. Not so much in the eighth grade when you have a History packet due and you put it off for two weeks, until you’re waking up at 03:00 listening to I Love Lucy and Murphy Brown furiously scrambling to get the thing done. Thanks channel 6 for replacing Murphy Brown with the Bloomberg Financial Report sometime in March, that really helped me stay awake there. Mom, if you’re reading this, I made that last part up. Well, most of it. I have no idea what they replaced Murphy Brown with, I moved to Janesville in March. ?? Um, Procrastatron doesn’t help when I’m trying to write a blog entry or do a podcast for that matter either.

Anyway, my conversations with this little robot in my head go something like this:

Me: Excellent. Time to blog.
Procrastatron: But your laptop is all the way over there and you’re really comfortable on the couch.
Me: Pfft, it’s 36 inches you lazy robot. I think I can get the computer and stay under this blanket.
Crasty: Don’t bother. Your two readers have already moved on.
Me: Quiet you. I have at least four, maybe six, readers and I must keep them entertained.
Jerk: [I can see I’ll just have to bring out the big guns] Here, have some Melatonin.
Me: You fight dirty. I’ll show you. I’m gonna… Gonna… [Snore]

Yeah. I’ll show him. One of these days I’ll reprogram him into Doitnowatron and be so productive… Why am I suddenly tired?

***

Enough of that for the day.

To catch you all up. It’s been a crazy couple of months. Work has kept Treva and I busy and we traveled quite a few times around the holidays.

By a few times, I mean I think I was on something like 12 different aircraft in 4 weeks.

It started at Thanksgiving when we flew to Wisconsin to spend time with my family. We got in on Wednesday and stayed until Sunday afternoon. It was a lot of fun. While we were there we attended our friend Sarah’s wedding. We spent time at the reception hanging out with our friend Rachael and her family. It was great to have a chance to reconnect with some people I hadn’t seen in several years.

What wasn’t so great was the trip back. It was kind of a stormy day, stupid winter, and the Atlanta airport, stupid Atlanta airport, was backed up like crazy. We got hit with a ground hold in Milwaukee and left two hours late. When we got into Atlanta we had to hang out for a while. We boarded the flight about the time we were originally supposed to leave (22:30 or so). However, for whatever reason, we did not get off the ground until close to midnight. To top it off, the complementary XM wasn’t working in my row.

We landed at BWI around 00:50 and headed to pick up our bags. Something you should understand about BWI, it can take anywhere from one to twenty years to get luggage off the plane there. Accordingly, it was 01:30 by the time we reclaimed our bags. No, actually our one bag. Standing at the baggage carousel, waiting on bag number two, I hear the following, “Mr. Olivrivero” (hehe, close enough buddy). He hands me a bag, covered in goo, and proceeds to explain that, “Something spilled.” Oh, good, cuz my first guess would have been that it went through the plane wash and the rinse cycle broke.

Turns out one of our shampoo bottles popped open and the cap slid off sideways, filling the bag with the entire contents. YUCK!! I found a bathroom and cleaned the thing off because Treva, most likely accurately, pointed out that no cabby would want that mess in his vehicle.

01:45. The cab dispatcher doesn’t seem to have clue one and we stand around until he pulls it together and realizes we in fact want a cab.

02:15. We make it home. I, not wanting to deal with the goopy mess in the morning clean the bag and toss a load of laundry in.

We make it to bed about 03:00 and fall into a deep sleep.

06:20. BEEEP! BEEP! BEEEP! BEEP!

No way. Already? This has to be a nightmare.

Actually, I’m sure my thoughts were no where near that coherent. They probably ended at “MARGG! DIE!”

Out of respect for anyone who would have to tollerate either of us, Treva and I took half the day off.

***

I flew to Bentonville, Arkansas in mid December to meet with a small company none of you have ever heard of. (It rhymes with Ham’s Flub). We had good, productive meetings and I flew home. To repack for the trip to Indiana the next day.

For another wedding.

A brief aside. The majority of our trips for the period beginning Thanksgiving and ending in August are centered around someone’s wedding. There’s R and K’s in April and my Sister’s in August left to go.

This weekend was also Christmas with Treva’s family since we were in the area.

We had to alter our travel plans between Greenwood and Goshen slightly when Cape Air decided they would stop flying any of their Indiana commuter operations cancelling our Indianapolis to South Bend flight. Thanks guys. Though I think we had more fun our wway.

Treva’s brothers drove down and gave us a ride. This was probably the most amusing car trip I have ever taken next to the time I was driving around with Rachael and Sarah, playing my horn out the window and waving an orange safety flag. We hooked up with them in the parking lot of a Wal Mart and then decided to hit BW3s for dinner. After which, we were laughing so hard at something that we missed the turn onto I69 and had to take the long way. Which apparently didn’t bother Chris too much since he got to stop and wake up a cousin at 02:00 to ask for Pepsi, which the guy didn’t have anyway. We finally made it back to Goshen about 03:00 and went to sleep. We spent Sunday and Monday with Treva’s family and friends and headed back Monday evening.

We were back in Wisconsin for Christmas and hung with my family again. Good times!

This past week we had friends from Texas and Nebraska visiting. We had a big party at Ronza’s on New Year’s Eve and just hung out the rest of the time.

Okay. I’m wrapping this up. I need to write more often so I can be more detailed. I’m not writing a novel here.

Thanks for reading. Stop back soon. Procrastatron and I are going to take a nap.

Thank you everyone for playing along with “I verbed a noun because random phrase.” Your answers made me smile.

Today several colleagues, Treva, and I took advantage of McDonald’s free Southwestern Style chicken sandwich deal for lunch. The McDonalds near work is not well known for swift execution of the “fast” part of fast food, but as Momtobe accurately pointed out, “they are always polite.”

As we were walking over Momtobe, leaving the restaurant and heading toward the bank, stopped us and asked if we had cash since the debit card machines weren’t working. After assuring her we were covered and a moment of me trying to figure out why they let it go three days without fixing it (I don’t really eat there all the time) we headed in.

After placing our orders for the McChikFilet I had what might be described as a “Here’s Your Sign” moment, but I still don’t know which one of us gets the sign. The clerk handed me a stack of bills and we had the following conversation:

I got this in e-mail, but decided to unleash it on the blogosphere. Since most of these involve tagging I tag everyone who reads this (it’s my secret plot to figure out who reads this blog). Leave your response in the comments or put it on your own blog and pingback. Have fun!!